


Possibly

by tartanfics



Category: The Hour
Genre: Characters having complicated relationships, F/F, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:30:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I wondered if we ought to go in together, give up men. We could hardly expect each other to play pretty wives.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Possibly

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the end of series 2.

Lix gets lost in the hospital. Randall wouldn’t come with her, said he had to do--oh, something. Doesn’t matter. She’ll leave him to himself for a while. The lights are dimmed, turning the usual hospital sea green into a deep teal. It makes her look down at her hand gripping the edge of her coat and feel pale. She feels pale anyway, with everything.

It’s past visiting hours.

She passes a nurse in a hallway and tries to look like she knows where she’s going so she won’t get thrown out. She’s very tall, in this hospital.

“Lix.” 

She pauses, turns back, looks in through an open door to a mostly dark room. There’s a table lamp in the corner, and on the other side of the room Bel is sitting, wearing that same red suit she wore last night and her coat still on. 

“Hello,” Lix says, sitting down next to Bel. She doesn’t take her coat off either. 

“What are you doing here?” Bel asks without looking at her.

“I thought I’d--oh, darling, that’s a stupid question. Of course I’m here.” She puts her hand into her pocket and runs her thumb over her lighter, doesn’t take it out.

Bel nods, slow and jerky. 

Lix is afraid to ask. But Bel is still here. 

“Have you eaten anything?” A stand-in question. “Or--I should have brought us a bottle of something.”

“I had... a sandwich.” Bel says, not sounding very certain about it. “I don’t remember what was in it.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. I--.” Bel swallows, pulls her coat tighter around herself. She’s mostly in shadow, a beautiful shape in the dark. “He’ll be fine, they said.”

Lix feels a rock in her chest reveal itself as clay and crumble. “Good,” she says on an exhale. And then, considering, “Why are you still sitting here?”

Bel smiles, mostly, and turns to Lix. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Lix stretches her legs out in front of her, crosses her ankles. Her trousers are a bit crumpled. “You could go in and see him, couldn’t you?”

“I could,” Bel says. Her fingers brush over the buttons on her coat, curling. “Do you remember when--” breath “--Freddie was gone, and we--”

“Darling, of course I do.” Lix reaches out and puts a hand on Bel’s sleeve. 

“Can we do that again?” Bel asks the floor, Lix’s feet. 

“Not that I don’t want to kiss you,” Lix says, turning sideways in her chair to look at the place where Bel’s jaw meets her neck. “But the operative part of that question seems to be ‘when Freddie was gone,’ and he is, thank God, not gone now.”

Bel stands up, walks a little closer to the light so that she becomes invisible to Lix, a silhouette with sharp edges but no features. “I used to worry--when I let myself think about it--that I couldn’t do The Hour, not as it deserves to be done, and still expect anyone to--. Bill said I was impossible.” She turns halfway, her face in dim portrait. “I thought maybe you felt the same, so I wondered if we ought to go in together, give up men. We could hardly expect each other to play pretty wives.” 

Lix sits up straight and leans forward over her knees. She hopes any answer she might make to this will come to her when she has to make it, because her mind is blank now.

“That’s why I--kissed you, I suppose. I was just waiting to see what would happen, when _he_ came back and everything went to hell.” Bel turns a little further, half-looking at Lix.

“I won’t say it wouldn’t be different,” Lix says slowly. “Two women. But it wouldn’t solve anything.” Lix wishes for a glass in her hand. Not to drink so much as to hold, to feel the weight. “And Freddie’s convinced you you’re not impossible, hasn’t he?”

Even in the dimness Lix can see Bell bite her lower lip, see a hovering cloud of uncertainty. “I don’t know. Possibly. He believes it.”

“I agree with Freddie, of course. He’s a very intelligent boy when he's not an idiot.”

Bel nods. “But if Freddie hadn’t come back, would we have tried it?”

“If Freddie hadn’t come back, if you hadn’t met Bill Kendal, _if_ \--oh hell, if Randall hadn’t arrived. Bel, we could have tried it, but it would only have worked if it weren’t subject to the comings and goings of men.” Lix unfolds herself from the chair, stands and crosses the room past Bel to the lamp in the corner. She switches it off, pulling them both under into the even dimmer light seeping from the hallway. 

“What are you doing?” Bel asks. He coat rustles when she turns towards Lix, the movement obvious even in the darkness. 

“Freddie will be all right,” Lix says as firmly as she possibly can. “We all will. But I do in fact want to kiss you again. Just the once, and then you’re to go in and see Freddie.”

Bel is still, silent. Then she nods and the shadow of her hand reaches towards Lix, and the answering shadow of Lix’s whole body moves to meet it. Lix folds her arm around Bel’s back. Both of them are bulkier than they ought to be, with coats still on. Inside this merging of shadows Lix finds she can’t move further, can’t lean in. So she breathes against Bel’s face and waits until Bel does it, tilting up and brushing their lips together. 

Unleashed, Lix does this exactly as she wants to, pressing Bel back and taking advantage of their slight height disparity to make herself even taller. She kisses Bel the way she was used to being kissed when she was younger and sillier. 

Bel isn't very silly, so she doesn't respond as the kiss intends her to--she opens her mouth and tongues against Lix's lower lip. Bel's inability to do things the way she's supposed to is exactly why Lix tried kissing her like this. Lix was hoping for the unexpected. 

It's a soft kiss, a mutual breathing and damp warmth, and it makes Lix feel better about nearly everything. She doesn't entirely know why she's doing this or why it seems to work, but she keeps kissing Bel, lips and tongue moving like a slowly panning camera. It does work. It may never work again, but that's all right. 

Finally Bel pulls back. Her hands are hooked in the belt of Lix's coat; she unwinds them but keeps holding on. "Thank you, Lix," Bel says. 

"Of course, darling," Lix says. Bel's hair was falling down to begin with, but Lix makes a brief attempt to smooth out her own contribution to the chaos. There's a reason she keeps her hair short. "Go see Freddie."

Bel lets go entirely and steps away, a pretty shadow with her fingers just catching the light from the hallway. "I'm afraid I've been quite useless about the news today," she mutters. "But now I know Freddie's all right I'll--he doesn't need me here to get better."

"Yes he does," Lix says. "Sometimes. You can do both."

"You believe that?"

"I don't know, to be honest. I've certainly never done it. But I may yet try." Lix crosses her arms and imagines it, doing both, doing everything. And then Lix licks her lips and smiles, suddenly brought back to the most ordinary present. "I believe your sandwich was fish paste," she says. 

Bel laughs.


End file.
